Cancel culture is wrong not just when it is your side that is cancelled.
Move over, Holocaust deniers.
Take second fiddle, indulgers in vaccine mandates = Holocaust.
Forget your shame, Holocaust minimizers (“six million dead? no way”).
Step aside, you who say “shuddup about the Holocaust already.”
None of you has met Whoopi Goldberg. Her mutation on the Holocaust truly takes the cake.
In her lens, the Holocaust was just a matter of one set of white guys against another set of white guys.
It was about “man’s inhumanity to man.” She says it had nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with race.
Is this sheer ignorance? Is there even a word for this? Has Goldberg ever heard of Adolf Hitler and his maniacal hatred of what he called the Jewish race? Has she read Mein Kampf?
Does she think that gas chambers and crematoria — mechanized mass murder — was a mirror image of the 75-years-later, American, post-George Floyd bifurcation of a non-European society, namely America, into black-and-white? Even the word anachronism cannot capture her sheer blindness to history.
We shall not devote the rest of this editorial to correcting the multiple inaccuracies and cross-eyed distortions in Goldberg’s words, except on one count, before we move on to argue: It is not wise or beneficial for ABC News to suspend Whoopi Goldberg.
The one count is this: Hitler, indeed, homogenized all Jews as a single, vile, dangerous race. But the Jewish people are anything but. There are white Jews, brown Jews, black Jews, Asian Jews; there are European Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Hispanic Jews, Indian Jews (to name only the most prominent types of Jews); there are Jews who speak every language from English to Ladino to Amharic to German to Spanish — the list goes on and on.
As astigmatic as Whoopi Goldberg is, she should not be shut down. Educated, yes; silenced, no. Either there is free speech, or there is not. Either we in this country have faith that the unrestricted marketplace of ideas will enlighten the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, or we do not. Either we are prepared to suffer the discomfort of stupid, inaccurate and malicious speech until the classic corrective — more speech — comes into play, or we are not.
Goldberg did not yell fire in a crowded theater, the classic limitation on free speech. The thunderous, overwhelming and swift criticism that Goldberg’s words evoked demonstrated once again that unworthy free speech triggers even more powerful, worthy speech in a truly free society.
We worry that that our freedom is endangered by the automatic “cancel culture” response to speech that one side or another detests. Cancel culture is wrong not just when it’s your side that is cancelled. It was wrong of ABC News to suspend Goldberg. No better evidence of the intolerance and crookedness of that response is precisely the intelligent, informed, passionate critique Goldberg has received. However much it did or did not educate her, it certainly informed her audience and increased knowledge of the Holocaust as it was, not as she said it was.
Both Goldberg and her audience would have been far better served had ABC lined up a slate of knowledgeable people for Goldberg to interview, not least a Holocaust survivor. A program like “The View” has a massive audience. Instead of suspending her, why not transform her professed ignorance into an educational opportunity?
It is wrong to characterize speech with which one disagrees as “misinformation.” If ever there were an Orwellian word, this is the 2020s’ version. “Misinformation” means “ban free speech” wrapped in the pious guise of superior knowledge. To the extent that information is not factually based, prove it. Do not cancel it.
By definition, freedom of speech is uncomfortable. A society that looks for comfort in banning free speech, however innocently, elegantly or idealistically the ban may be couched, will end up banning not just the speech that is now deemed objectionable, but the speech is that now deemed right.
Whoopi Goldberg was wrong. We cannot count the number of media outlets and commentators and plain folk who have told her so. That is how free speech should work, not by canceling her.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
